Taught By

Andrew Metrick

Timothy Geithner

Transcript

[MUSIC] Welcome to Module 4 on Safe Assets and the Global Savings Glut. In this module, take you through a variety of very, very important building blocks for understanding how the shadow banking, wholesale banking system is set up. First, a set of introductions. Just what we think of as shadow banking and how it is parallel or similar to the traditional banking system. We'll do that in Lesson One. Then this term, safe assets that you have already heard a little bit about and will hear much more about, as the course goes along, will be defined and put into the context of what was going on in the world over the last few decades. Then there will be three lessons on what is now known as The Global Savings Glut hypothesis, or the GSG hypothesis, a term that was coined by Ben Bernanke, before he was chairman of the Federal Reserve. In talking about the large amount of savings in the developing countries like China and oil producing countries from the Middle East that became awash in the world in the early part of the 21st century and led to a lot of demand for what we call safe assets. This demand was met by, at that time, a strangely diminishing supply and we'll talk about that supply in Lesson Six. In a world where there is excess demand for anything, you are going to go and you are going to see that there's some producer that's gonna come out and manufacture it. In the case of safe assets, those producers are financial institutions and they manufacture safe assets predominately through a process called securitization. We will talk about that process and exactly what is the mechanics behind that process in Lessons Seven and Eight. In Lessons Nine and Ten, we'll look at some data on securitization that shows how securitization grew right along with the Global Savings Glut in the early years of the 21st century. Finally, in Lesson 11, we summarize what we've learned in this module. [MUSIC]

Explore our Catalog

Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.